Half-time disco beats, heavy on the hi-hat. Synth lasso'd in heavy, crackly chunks. Screaming, pained vocalist. Dark angles. It's what characterizes the disco portion of early 21st Century après-punk, and its elements are bound together by The Rapture, Hot Hot Heat, Dance Disaster Movement, GoGoGo Airheart, Chromatics, Headphone, Liars, Radio Vago, Numbers, Radio 4, et cetera, et al. You've heard it before. You've been hearing it for three years. There's no reason disco-warped dance punk shouldn't proliferate-- it makes perfect sense. Come On got reissued. Dancing is fun. Neon is the new black. Now let's fuck shit up until the end of the world.

Only now, it's getting to be sort of obvious. While most of the above bands and their many brethren have some distinctive quality to separate them from the dance beat-wielding, underground-infiltrating masses, and some of them are even great, it's simply no longer that distinctive or special to simply play disco beats informed by hardcore and 80s new wave and goth-- which is why I'm not crazier about Seattle four-piece Hint Hint. They have all the elements to be unique, but first, they must learn to fuse those elements with grace, space, and diversity, 'cause right now, they near-methodically plow over every predictable aspect of danceable punk rock music.

It's not that Sex is Everything, the first record on Cold Crush-- a new label run by Dim Mak's Steve Aoki and Pretty Girls Make Graves' Derek Fudesco-- isn't enjoyable. Its six songs seethe with spiraling energy and tension between dual keyboards and guitar, while singer Peter Quirk lets out speedy, gravelly yelps like a steroidal Peter Murphy. (He even fronts British at times.) On "Rung by Rung", cymbals crash hectically behind a certain Bauhaus steez, all gloomy low-end and cracked guitar. "Among the Blind" is a damaged punk number above church-bells tolling. The song's lyrics go, "Buried alive all the time/ But the doctor said I'm fine," but could just as easily be, "The line between the devil's teeth and that which cannot be repeat," for the speedy way they're sung. The creepy, downturned "Plastic and Whores" begins with a mediocre taste of electronic beats, but explodes in a melting battery of crushing noise, static, and blood-curdling screams. Later, the electronics redeem themselves a bit with a scratch-mocking sputter on the hardcore end of glitch, only to end impotently in a hollering, fizzled-out jam.

Individually, each song conforms to a similar tempo and explores virtually zero dynamic diversity. There's no breathing room for the melodies, so it sounds like a messy pile of molten, smoldering metal. This is a hindrance when their aesthetic is so similar to that of other bands, and makes their divergences-- that they're a little more hardcore, and like to sprinkle in the standard, rocker-using-ProTools beats and squelches-- not as significant on the whole.